Up to 200,000 people in the Wilkes-Barre area were ordered to evacuate their homes Wednesday because of rising water on the Susquehanna River, swelled by a record-breaking deluge that has killed at least 10 people across the Northeast. Thousands more were ordered to leave their homes in New Jersey, New York and Maryland. Across the region, rescue helicopters plucked residents from rooftops as rivers and streams surged over their banks. Wilkes-Barre, a northeastern Pennsylvania city that was devastated by flooding in 1972 by the remnants of Hurricane Agnes, is now protected by levees. But county officials said the Susquehanna was expected to crest just a few feet from the tops of the 41-foot floodwalls.... http://www.cbsnews.com

Former President Clinton says both he and his wife oppose a change to the Democratic presidential primary calendar that would allow another state to hold a caucus after Iowa and before the New Hampshire primary. Clinton said his opposition to the Democratic National Committee plan has nothing to do with loyalty to the state that helped launch his 1992 campaign and everything to do with the need to preserve the integrity of the election process. After starting in the back of the pack, Clinton turned his second-place finish in New Hampshire that year into a victory, dubbing himself the ``Comeback Kid.'' He said the one-on-one campaigning that he did in New Hampshire made him a better candidate and president. We all thought Clinton was the worst empty suit to get into the White house, then came Bush Junior. And he is starting to make the Slime Ball look good...http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-5917611,00.html

Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt has ordered a probe into whether a Brussels-based banking consortium broke the law when it provided US anti-terror authorities with confidential information about international money transfers. The consortium known as SWIFT society for worldwide inter-bank financial telecommunications was brought into the limelight when the N Y Times last week reported that officials from the CIA, the FBI and other US agencies had since 2001 been allowed to inspect the transfers. Prime minister Guy Verhofstadt asked the Belgian justice ministry on Mon (26 June) to investigate whether SWIFT acted illegally in allowing US authorities to inspect the transfers without the support of a Belgian judge. "We need to ask what are the legal frontiers in this case and whether it is right that a US civil servant could look at private transactions without the approval of a Belgian judge," said government spokesman Didier Seus, according to the International Herald Tribune...http://euobserver.com/9/21963/

Germany's Cabinet agreed Wednesday to open to researchers an archive of millions of Nazi files that describe the mechanics of the Holocaust. The accord will likely be signed July 26 in Berlin, Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Jaeger said. Germany's move follows an agreement to unlock the archive reached last month by the 11-nation governing body of the International Tracing Service, the arm of the International Committee of the Red Cross that oversees the archive in the German town of Bad Arolsen.The strongest pressure to open the storehouse of some 50 million files came from the dying generation of Holocaust survivors and victims' families who feared the histories of their loved ones would be lost forever unless the rules were changed.The archive, controlled by 1955 agreements, holds virtually everything the Nazis recorded on the concentration camps & the prisoners held there. Experts say the opening could provide new insights into the mechanics of the Nazi extermination campaign...http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-06-28-nazi-archives_x.htm?csp=34

The Bush administration said on Wednesday it would offer $170 million to public and private partnerships to make solar energy more competitive with conventional electricity sources by 2015.The funding would be for three years, beginning in fiscal-year 2007. It would require industry-led teams to match each dollar the government gives them toward the project, which could generate an additional $170 million. The U.S. Energy Department said projects would need to focus on improving so-called photovoltaic cell technology which produces energy when exposed to light. "We will be asking the winning partnerships to focus their work on new manufacturing techniques as well as new component designs that will allow us to bring down the cost of producing photovoltaic fuel cells as quickly as possible," said U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman. ...http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2129978

Iran’s foreign minister used a speech to a U.N. conference on the illegal trade in small arms Wednesday to condemn Israel and comment on the threat he said was posed by its presumed nuclear arsenal.While stemming the illicit trade in small arms was the meeting’s focus, “fighting proliferation in weapons of mass destruction, and combating the threats posed by those who possess such weapons — and particularly the Zionist regime — will always remain our greatest goal,” said Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki.His remarks veered from the prepared text of his statement, which made no reference to Israel. Iran has argued repeatedly that the West is using a double standard against it by ignoring Israel, which is assumed to have about 200 nuclear weapons but has never confirmed having any and, unlike Tehran, has not joined the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty....http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13597628/